This book aims to show how aesthetics can contribute to professional practices and its reflections on children and young people with special needs. On the one hand, it is motivated by a need to reflect broader and work deeply with the vulnerable child that for some reason departs from what is conceived as the normal. On the other hand, we need to utilize the unused potential of aesthetic reflection and practice. This is the double impetus behind this book and the research done by diverse scholars from which it has emerged. The diversity in the contributors’ backgrounds and interests, as well as the different forms and expressions of the contributions, reflects and adds up to this multiplicity. Embracing aesthetics as a general foundation for any life form, grounding any symbolic representation of the world as man does in verbal language, mathematics or the arts, implies a similar acceptance and avowing of the fact that all humans are equal in their sensual interlacing with the world. Thus, addressing children and young people with special needs implies that diversity should be accepted and acclaimed as a goal in itself – a normative bias.

The anthology is aimed at researchers, scientists, scholars and teachers at universities and colleges of applied sciences and vocational studies. It can also be enriching for students and readers interested in aesthetics and special needs.

Children and Young People, Aesthetics and Special Needs is a scientific anthology. All the contributions are blindfolded peer reviewed.